European civic and business leaders at Davos got to see the real deal this week: an unfiltered Donald Trump—not just clips, highlights, and soundbites, but a full rambling, incoherent, zigzagging speech, live and in-person.
This isn't going to make them feel better about the state of the world.
Rory Stewart, a British academic, broadcaster, writer, and former diplomat and politician, tweeted: "One of the things I had not appreciated until I was in the room was how a flurry of misleading—and often fake statistics—embedded with a direct mafia demand for Greenland/'Iceland'—can simultaneously brutalize the world order while also being repetitive, flat and boring."
For European executives navigating transatlantic business strategy, this is a critical moment.
The dissonance between Trump's Davos messaging and the policy predictability that European boardrooms need creates a strategic challenge: How do you plan capital allocation, supply chain decisions, and market-entry strategies when the signals from Washington are this erratic?
The gap between Trump's presentation style and the structured, policy-coherent communication that European leaders expect from US administrations is more than political theater—it's a business risk factor.
Companies with significant US-Europe exposure need to scenario-plan for policy volatility, not policy clarity.
Bottom line: The Davos appearance confirmed what many European C-suites already suspected—managing US political risk requires real-time monitoring, flexible strategy frameworks, and direct stakeholder engagement channels that bypass official rhetoric.
This is the new normal for transatlantic business relations.
-Marc
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Marc A. Ross is a geopolitical strategist and communications advisor. He is the founder of Caracal Global and is writing a book entitled Globalization and American Politics: How International Economics Redefined American Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics.
